The USA Today ran an story a little over a week ago about the changing lifestyle of Americans based upon the longer and longer commute. The data has been clear for some time – our commutes are getting longer and longer with each passing year. However, the article does a pretty nice job of talking about some of the auxiliary impacts, like on news and carpooling, that one would not normally consider. Families have known for years about the lengthening compute because they’ve been experiencing it first hand. I know it’s part of the reason I left Washington, D.C. a number of years ago and the problem has just gotten worse.

Just before we spoke with Jack Dangermond at the SAG awards session at the ESRI UC, we got the chance to meet Dr. Roger Tomlinson, commonly referred to as the ‘father of GIS’. He was a good chat, and informed us that West Virginia played an early role in wine made in the US. Click on the image to see it at full size.

So I just spent the last hour or so flying through the 645 posts from the geoblogs that I haven’t had a chance to read over the last month (being tech support’s assitant in a brand new building eats up your time). When you read blogs regularly it seems like things are kind of shuffling along, but when you look at what we all talk about in a single month, it is pretty darn impressive.

For the first time Frank’s choice of Sprint may actually be a good thing. The mobile phone provider is rolling out Live Search for their phones which is now location-based. Apparently this isn’t an exclusive deal with Sprint and Microsoft, but Sprint is the first to implement the technology which isn’t GPS-based so it should be usable on most phones. The article says it is done with cell tower triangulation, but I am wondering if it can also take advantage of GPS/aGPS to enhance location accuracy. At the same time, you don’t need an exact location since you are simply doing a search for results that are spatially relevant, not a search for where you are. Either way we will let you know if they implemented it locally on this week’s podcast after Frank tries it out.

We are beginning to plan the third New Media panel for the upcoming AAG in Boston (in April). We have had great panels and very interested audiences (if not always the largest). I would like to include 2 or 3 geobloggers/podcasters who plan to attend AAG or live near Boston and we will try to find a local blogger and someone with a reader’s perspective to kind of explain the pros and cons of keeping up with our deluge of content.

If you are interested in participating in the panel please email me. There are a couple of folks I have been trying to entice for the last couple of years that hopefully will be able to join us this year.

On a side note, I am also going to try to put together something for the ESRI Ed UC next August as well, so email if you are interested in talking about education, communication, and the internet.

A French library has an interesting collection online of postcards/paintings done by futurists around the turn of the last century. They detail how artists and engineers of the time thought the year 2000 would look. Some of them are pretty accurate given the lens of the current technology. My favorites are the school kids with the electric hats and book grinder and then the one with the bat wing firefighters.

It makes you wonder how far off our current predictions concerning the future are going to be. Since we have a better understanding of the physical universe, are we going to be better at predicting the future or worse?

Apparently the hispanic community doesn’t even warrant an actual month for Hispanic Heritage Month since it runs from Sept 15 to Oct 15. In recognition of our friends who hablan espanol or are descended from those that do I want to remind you that are some great spanish blogs and podcast. Just to mention a few, check out Geografia Para Llevar, El mundo de los mapas, and La Cartoteca.